


Nine Lives Theory

by Shusu (Sameshima_Shuzumi)



Series: Spooky Offerings [4]
Category: Submachine
Genre: Ancient Egyptian Deities, Cats, Etymology, Other, Quantum Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-30
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-05-02 10:41:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5245265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sameshima_Shuzumi/pseuds/Shusu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A thesis of the submachine as told by a cat. It seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nine Lives Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Enigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigel/gifts).



> DISCLAIMER. Images, some quotes, and universe belong to Mateusz Skutnik. No major spoilers for the Submachine or Covert Front games; however, all images are secrets or found in difficult-to-access areas. One image is an actual infographic from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shiva and Thoth are Deities Not Appearing In This Fic. Hieroglyph by Nephiliskos, used with a share-alike Creative Commons license. Cats won't spare the time to quote entire passages from Egyptian funerary texts, so aspects and concepts of _self_ were not explained; sufficed to say some deities may not actually be conflated together, or even related. Links provided for reader's edification — presented facts are not necessarily verifiable by wholly human means. 

Cats hate water.

This is not entirely true.

Tepid water, brown frothing water, whirlpools going in the wrong direction, water that drips from icicles: these are the waters cats hate. And also dishwater. Do not bathe a cat in a sink.

The misty roar of flowing water from a precarious rock? Cats are drawn to those. Not only because of the fish.

Water in motion creates energy, and cats believe in that, even if they don't know what negative ions are, don't retain memories of their savannah ancestors parting grasses with their guttural calls.

This is true of a waterfall in Kent.

*

Anything a cat believes is true.

*

People are funny about names. They arrive at a piece of land and start rubbing their names on it. They call this one Kent. That one Cornwall. Norfolk over there. With a lack of subtlety which surprises even cats, these places are now in New England.

Just because they called it 'submachine' doesn't make it theirs.

*

The first people here called it Skatacook. It means 'fork in the river'. A confluence.

It's descriptive.

Cats don't need reasons to observe a human set up a thin canvas tent beside a series of waterfalls. A cat might know precisely where the water is moving fast enough for clean drinking, and not so fast that it would pull them in. They might sense where the energy of the cascade is greatest.

If a cat were to dart across the rocks at a precise moment in time, activating the visceral fear of motion caught in one's peripheral vision, leading to a clumsy, simian misstep—there's no reason required for that either.

Murtaugh wouldn't have manifested a seven-fold arm if he hadn't reached through the layers to break his fall.

Some matters come together like that.

  


*

Hunt-and-peck. (One-handed.) Tappity tap the keys. (These keys are not approved for tails and furry butts.)

No one ever asks why he wrote a diary to be ripped up.

What was he playing at? Did he expect someone else to read it?

*

Who's telling this story? What is their name?

For a given period of time, _no one knows_.

*

Games? Games are easy.

Pounce, pounce, pounce.

Paw.

*

A cat appears.

This is a fundamental truth of cats, an _ur_ -truth. At any given time, in any given place: a cat appears.

For all the ways Murtaugh has found to travel, he is attached to his original layer. He claims to transcend all and everything, yet he can't abandon his frames of reference.

A cat appears, and he names it 'Einstein'.

*

Mur has a ready answer for everything.

He wants you to know any set number of things, except for what happened to his flesh-and-blood arm.

Don't ask a cat. They land on their feet.

*

We will never know if he thought a cat could belong to him.

Quite a bit of evidence suggests as much.

We prefer the kind of evidence crumpled into balls and tossed across the room.

*

Humans used to be sensible about their feline attachments. Pests destroyed crops. Cats destroyed pests. Humans needed crops. Humans worshiped cats.

We hunted in high-ceilinged temples and candlelit corners. The humans left food and fresh water for us. Scritched us in exchange for purrs. We padded down stairs, two at a time, in the crepuscular hours.

(Pretend this is ancient Egypt, with sand in our fur. Not everyone is prepared for the jaguar secrets, the tiger battles. Remember ancient Egypt? We'll start out easy, in the dark.)

Any harm coming to a cat was often answered by death.

We leaped up the stairs, five, seven, nine at a time.

(Infinity.) 

*

Buried in a lighthouse built over a prison, Murtaugh risked much to ask Elizabeth to watch the cat.

Good answer.

*

Turn on a video. Watch a cat chase its prey.

(Make a video of it.)

Oh, it's funny _now_. Until a swipe goes through, a paw through water.

*

Murtaugh is scritches and seagull movies and laser pointers.

Liz is lap-cuddles and cushy chairs and bits of paper on a string.

Purrs are for Liz, but sometimes there is a slow, deliberate blink for Mur.

*

> Atum's two offspring became separated from him and lost in the dark nothingness, so Atum sent his "Eye" to look for them (a precursor to the "Eye of Ra", an epithet given to many deities at different times). When they were found, he named Shu as "life" and Tefnut as "order" and entwined them together (Hill, 1). 

  


*

There's good mousing to be had in a subterranean lighthouse. Pests find those bolt-holes, they do. They'd keep making more if they were allowed, boring more holes into the structure.

There's plenty to catch. Just stretch, reach through, and take it.

*

We have taken all the things from all the drawers. 

Now they are ours.

We keep them in the secret place.

*

There is another Kent.

Like a sword-wall over the ocean, it's known soldiers' boots: invaders and refugees and avengers. It knows air raid sirens. On the surface, its bunkers and sandbag walls pummeled by bombs, it does not resemble its namesake.

On the surface.

The old word for the place, and the people there, means _rim_. These are border-places, lines thin as whiskers, where things cascade from one plane to another, where there are places to cross.

There is always another Kent. They are not the same places.

That doesn't stop a cat. 

*

"Oh... my..." Elizabeth drops her bags. 

"Miaow."

"Mew."

"Nyan."

"Mrowr."

"Miau."

"Yao-ng."

"Naiou."

"Meow."

"There are eight of you," says Elizabeth. She touches her lips, then sticks out her finger to count again.

Time to clean. Lick, lick. Tails flick like a pendulum.

"Of course there are eight of you," she sighs.

*

The secret? 

There are nine.

*

Why spill our secrets?

Wrong question.

*

> "If they really wanted to kill us," she asked, "don’t you think it would have happened?" (Hanson, 2). 

  


*

Some people fall in water and they don't die. They forget to breathe, and that's what keeps them alive, because people can't breathe water.

Some people climb out of the ground and never see the sun. People can't look at the sun, it burns their eyes.

Cats have heard the one about the box where they are both dead and not yet dead.

Cats have told a few whoppers about humans, too.

*

There is no spoon.

*

In a forgotten pantheon, a cat is seated.

Below, the water ripples.

*

We don't need to remember anything.

We're there right now.

*

Turn around and the whole world tilts.

Close the circuit and get yanked along like paper on string.

*

Submachines, the machines beneath.

Beneath what?

Leave a bowl of food outside.

What is outside?

Who leaves a sinking ship first, the hunter or the hunted?

That answer is obvious. Look over the edge and wonder: would there be—

*

How does the player keep ending up in the machine? Over and over, they are underground. They find the same pages. They write the same notes.

Everything a cat rubs up on belongs to them.

A cat appears... to be everywhere.

How do secrets end up in dark corners, shiny orbs that are fun to chase? How do fluttering papers lodge in the same place? How do the equations regenerate? 

A claw can be sharp enough to carve a symbol into metal.

*

Cats can read?!

Wrong question.

*

People don't even have names for our maths.

*

Sometimes humans are confused about their own hieroglyphs. They're a forgetful lot. A few thousand years and they act like ruins were always ruins. Next they'll say they've never heard of _3_ kr, invoked with vowels as Aker, Akar: he who is beneath.

On stone, on papyrus, Akar is two big cats poised, a sun sphere riding their merged backs. Horizontal. He is also known as Rwty, of course, Ruti, the two lions. One face looks to the rising sun. One looks to the sunset. 

Their statues are placed at gates and doorways.

The sphinxes seem to face away from the portal they're supposedly guarding. 

They _do_ face each other. Their body is the horizon.

And the Earth is a sphere.

*

Stare all you want at that image set.

Go on, try not to reblog it.

You never knew cats could bend like that.

*

'Outside' is another word for extra layer. How else to bound from roof to roof, on light paws?

*

How could Mur mistake 32 years for 32 days?

Cats find the notion of fixed points silly — how could one point be like another? Every noon. Every yuletide. Deadlines, what are they? (What's ten years, anyway?) Circadian and seasonal aren't words which cats use.

It's the game _humans_ play — break the lock, blast down the doors, melt the control panel — again, again, again.

Humans are the ones who mistake rotations for revolutions.

*

Escape. 

Is that the game?

Or the point?

*

Humans are so impatient. 

'We're backtracking?!' they gripe.

'Gone. Again. I'm fed up with this. That damn cat!' they whine.

'Every time I find some item I have to wander around submachines looking where to put it. I'm so tired right now. Pls help!' they scribble with purple glitter pen.

'It's too much trouble to develop this theory, when our entire field has devoted itself to a world-view made acceptable when some wild haired geniuses [won an argument in 1927](http://i68.tinypic.com/b845cm.jpg)!'

Something like that.

The details are unimportant while so swiftly in motion.

Unless they're hunting us, they'd never notice the patterns which our meandering paws transcribe.

Nothing of significance. Only the ineffable velveteen of reality.

Humans. So minuscule before the universe. They are unnaturally bad at scale.

  
  
(Harris and Bush, 3.) 

*

_...one drop would be enough. Just one drop..._

*

Equivalences are tricky.

Mass is the same as energy. Except not quite. Mass is a form of energy, poised for conversion to other kinds of energy.

Kent is both pocked with bomb craters and resplendent with gardens, depending on the day.

A cat is both a lion and an idol.

Atum, the complete one, the finisher, is a primordial god, with hardly a dedicated statue left. Yet all know Her-His name. Progenitor of gods. Her-His Eye is not the Eye of Re. Yet Atum is the same _Atum-Re_ who emerged from the waters of chaos. Who returns there, still.

The garden is the subnet.

The scarab herds the sun.

The lion goddesses wear the title of the Eye of Re, protectors, his savage retaliation. The lion-bodied guard the horizon, east and west, and they are called Akar: he who bends. In plural, both are the picture of vengeance.

But for the unreal horizon, would there be a difference between sea and sky? 

The same, yet not equivalent.

Nine cats. One.

*

_Liz? Hope this gets to you. I think I'm missing one. I counted them like you said, and I keep coming up short! The food bowl is empty but they must be catching something outside cos that's not enough to feed that many cats! Right? I'll pop out and call for them, laters!_

"Oh no." Liz's forehead meets the desk. Not marking. Thumping. "Don't. Follow. The cat."

There is glitter on her brow.

*

Liz was quite sad when she docked at the Winter Palace. We wove around her ankles. She looked for the library.

When the ink was still fresh, we stalked the bright grasses, blessing them with our scent. The marble steps were cool under our paws. The statues like any other temple statues, without the worship. Once we fell asleep on a springy branch, and the tree grew up under us. Guards with ladders came to get us down, back when there were ladders to be had.

Liz dug through the leaves. History shed like so much red sand. Faded calligraphy told of the outer rim, of the Fourth Dynasty with its brickwork vaults, gleaming colonnades, and fountains stocked with blind fish. The best water comes with its own snack.

Only maps remain of the architecture. The library is gone, yet Liz keeps the books.

We know what books are good for.

They are for sitting.

*

Mur had one question he never answered. He asked it at the very beginning.

He only spoke to the people he saw.

If you've gotten that far, you know: he saw no one else.

Like gazing at the water's surface and never seeing the fish. 

How very _human_ of him.

*

Is the player alone in there?

Or is there a multitude of players logging on at all hours, from all over the world, gaming online or on copies in their own drive? Are there readers right at this moment opening search engines, entering _submachine_?

(You won't uncover all the secrets unless you play.)

The game is nothing but a drawing on a piece of paper. Seagulls on an uploaded video. Lonely lighthouses in a picture frame. Giant canvases thick with paint. It's there, but does a player see it?

(A hawk. A horizon. A well-fed feline.)

Can cats cross their own path?

*

'Einstein' means 'one stone', derived from place-names describing walled enclosures of stone.

*

  


*

The Eye of Re is a sun sphere, daughter of Re, feminine to Re's masculine, independent of Re and/or Atum. 

(The Eye of Re resides in the uraeus, the cobra on the crown. The cat battles the snake, again, again, again. We are our own worst enemy.)

It's not one entity. It's what people call a job title: she who defends Re. Sekhmet, Menhit, Tefnut, Mestjet, many more, manifold, goddesses all, lion-headed, raining fire on the waters of chaos.

Bastet, both the peaceful and the vicious — goddess of every housecat. (Every housecat, a goddess.)

Someone dares to enter the courtyard of the pantheon. 

The bell-like tinkle of shattering stone. Ears prick, and eyes... 

*

Think the submachine isn't real?

Think a game rendered in finite dimensions can't affect this cozy universe?

Don't look now — it just devoured 

all 

that 

precious 

  
time.

*

Can't fault people for trying to survive, though.

Cats can be diplomatic, sometimes.

Sometimes, sticking to one's own layer is safer. Scurry along. Live your delectable little lives. Replay your memories. Watch the roots of the submachine grow.

Try not to think too hard about what it means to be classed an 'infestation.'

Or what sort of creature is good at getting rid of those.

* 

They rend and trample the tapestries. We can smell the sacrilege. 

The sudden dark can blind, and it's too late, we are already there, leonine eyes glinting in the shadows.

(Our claws are of infinite length.)

Pounce.

_Paw._

*

Why spill our secrets to _you_?

If we were bigger, we'd pulverize bones for the impertinence of the question.

But we like Liz. She keeps yarn in no bowls. She brushes and brushes even when we cheat so she can brush again. The squeaky fake mice entertain us. The pretty breakable statues amuse us — how many times have they taken a hammer to it, _desecrated_ in the valley of the pantheon, just to lay greedy hands on another secret?

We like having our own dish. We like paper books, heavy as slabs of rock. We like warm sunshiney windowsills, and water we can trust.

We aren't in pieces; we are fed and petted. It's poetic, you see.

In the submachine, the mirrors show no faces. The dark glass of windows holding back sand and dirt hold _no reflections at all_.

*

_**Where am**_ **I** _ **?**_

*

—a splash?

At the foot of the stairs, the water is still.

*

Where is the reflection on this screen?

Better check.

*

The inscriptions in the Sanctuary put it best. 

'Be the witness.'

'What you think, you become.'

Or something like that. We were busy gnawing the yummy vines which tasted of light.

Liz understood. She kept up her reading. She kept up her writing, even with Murtaugh. She kept up with us.

Like a good human who belongs to us.

A sweet, careful person who remained outside the game.

(She doesn't even belong in the players' universe. Does anyone ask how she did this? Of course not. It's always Mur they jabber on about, with his dazzly tricks and anger.)

The player remains Just Beyond, outside, an observing tourist.

*

For now.

*

Hang on to your brochure.

*

Is that radio hiss electromagnetic? 

Or is it the purr of a cat?

*

Here, people, people. 

Come to kitty.

We have a game for you.

You won't be able to resist.

*

  


**Author's Note:**

> Works Cited   
>  1\. Hill, Jenny. "Gods of Ancient Egypt: Atum." _Ancient Egypt Online._ 2010\. Web.  < http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/atum.html >
> 
> 2\. Hanson, Hilary. "No, A Study Did NOT Find That Your Cat Wants To Kill You." _HuffPost Science._ The HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. 5 November 2015. Web.  < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cat-wants-to-kill-you-study-debunked_563a88ffe4b0307f2cac03c2 >
> 
> 3\. Harris, Daniel, and Bush, John. "The trajectory of a droplet 'walking' in a circular corral, colour-coded according to speed." Math.MIT.edu via NaturPhilosophie.co.uk. 2 November 2014. JPEG file. < http://www.naturphilosophie.co.uk/classical-quantum-conundrum-wave/ >   
>  
> 
> And one more, if you promise to behave in [someone's personal blog](http://fairymascot.tumblr.com/post/73723128001/the-other-day-i-went-with-a-friend-to-the-museum). We're watching. 
> 
>    
> An extra-narrative PSA: as of writing, there is no way to return to the secrets after the endgame. You'll have to gather them all before you exit.
> 
> Please minimize or mark spoilers in comments. Still, do leave a note: did _you_ get out?


End file.
